Justice for None: Texas Justice Book #1 (8 page)

“He broke my wrist—”

“Heard that part too,” Garland cut his son off. He was still wringing Val’s hand. Still smiling. “Seems like Mr. Justice just plain don’t like us Suttons,” he said as he released his grip. He turned to Zeke, gave him a sour frown and pointed at the door. “Go get Gene to drive you to the hospital.”

Zeke started to say something else, but a glare from Garland silenced him. He turned and slunk out the door without another word.

Garland turned, circled his desk and flopped back into his chair. He pointed Val at a metal folding chair.

Val didn’t want to sit, especially with Jasper perched on the corner of the desk like an impatient vulture, but he did it anyway. He’d stick to being cordial for as long as Garland did the same. But Val was tense. He stayed on the edge of the seat, keeping his feet under him and his hand near the little .25 in his hip pocket.

Garland was silent as he picked up a small bible that lay at the center of his desk and thumbed it open. “Zeke ain’t much,” he finally said, scowling at the bible page. “You killed the pick of the litter. Left me with nothing but a crippled bitch and a junkie.” His jaw ground and his face twisted in on itself like he was swallowing shattered glass. But he choked it down and plastered a paper-thin smile on his face when he looked up at Val. “The past is the past. Forgiveness is a blessing for both the sinner and them that’s been sinned against.”

“Skip the bible lesson and get to the point, Garland,” Val said impatiently.  “What do you want?”

Garland sighed. “The money,” he said. “Lamar and Lemuel’s money. The money they stole before you shot them down like dogs. Fifteen million dollars in cash and gold.” He paused meaningfully, his dingy eyes searching Val’s face. “It was never found. But Abby came by here last week and told me a little story. She said that
you
took it. That you still have it. Ain’t spent a cent.” Garland blinked once slowly, like a lizard. “Now, why would Abby think that, Mr. Justice?”

Valentine stared back at Garland in utter confusion. He’d heard many accusations over the last four years: that he was a murderer, a dirty cop who tampered with evidence and lied under oath, that he had intentionally crippled a teenage girl, but he had never been accused of being a thief.

Garland filled the silence. “It was never found. The money or the gold,” he said again.

“We assumed that someone was holding it. Someone inside the Confederate Syndicate,” Val replied pointedly. He wasn’t telling Garland anything the old man didn’t already know. Birch had rousted Garland and busted up this very clubhouse in a search for the cash and gold coins.

“That ain’t likely. Lamar wasn’t one for trusting people,” Jasper interjected. “He’d have kept the money close to hand. And you were in the house with Abby that day.” Smith scooted forward on the desk and started kicking the air with the pointed toe of one boot, his unblinking gaze fixed on Val. “You had already murdered Lamar and Lemuel. It was just you and her and all that money.”

Val stood abruptly. He had heard enough from this pair of lowlifes. “The money wasn’t there and I wasn’t in any shape to cart it off,” he said. He turned and went to the door, stopped on the threshold and turned back. “I don’t like having the Confederate Syndicate in my rearview,” he said, his flat gaze shifting between the two men. “It scares me. And when I get scared, I do scary things.”

“Like crippling little girls and gunning down unarmed men?” Jasper asked, tilting his head to the side, smiling lazily. “I kinda wonder how you’d do in a stand up fight.”

Val held Jasper’s gaze. “There’s only one way to find out, Jasper,” he replied. It was a stupid thing to say. Challenging a psycho like Smith was like skipping rope with a water moccasin, but Val had never been any good at backing away from a fight.

Jasper seemed to think about that for a moment before he nodded slowly. “I reckon you’re right,” he said as he eased off the edge of the desk, moving with a slow grace. His smile was still fixed in place, but his muddy-green eyes were hard and his oversized hands were knotted into fists; his knuckles the size of walnuts. “You want to take this outside or do it up right here?”

“Hold it now!” Garland barked as he jumped out of his chair, hurried around the desk and planted himself between the two taller men like a referee in a boxing ring. “Now, y’all just hold it right there,” he said looking back and forth between them. “You’re getting off on the wrong foot here. We’re all white Christians. Let Jesus—”

“I know
exactly
what Jasper is,” Val cut Garland off, “and it’s got nothing to do with Jesus.”

“No, sir,” Garland replied with an emphatic shake of his head,
“No, sir.
You know what Deaf
was.”
He turned to Jasper and waved one hand at the big man’s torso. “Show him, Deaf. Show him the stigmata. Make him
see.”

For a moment Jasper didn’t move, then he shrugged stiffly and reached for the hem of his shirt. The tension never left his body as he shucked the shirt over his head in one smooth motion. He lifted his arms and made a slow turn, showing a muscular torso, back and arms that were covered in horrible, gnarled and knotted burns that looked like cattle brands, each one in the crude shape of a crucifix. The positioning of the branded crosses seemed haphazard until Val noticed that bits and pieces of old tattoos showed through the burns. Swastikas, SS lightning bolts and the Stars and Bars had all been blotted out in the most painful fashion possible. Only the Dirty white Boys tattoo, an interlocked DWB on Jasper’s neck remained un-charred.

“All this,” Garland made a sweeping gesture at the crucifixes mounted on the walls and then at the ones seared into Jasper’s torso, “is Deaf’s own doing. His vision. A vision from Yahweh.” Garland pointed at the ceiling. “The tattoos he wore were symbols of the poison and hatred that once ruled his mind. But he
burned
that poison out. He accepted the Lord.” Garland paused a half-beat then dropped his voice when he continued. “And so can
you,
Mr. Justice.”

Val was repulsed by the burns, but the emotion never revealed itself on his face. His eyes settled back on Jasper Smith’s. He didn’t see Jesus there, just hatred and a promise of imminent violence. Probably the same thing that Jasper saw in Val’s eyes.

Suddenly, the tension went out of Jasper. He grinned, sat back down on the desk corner and crossed his arms over his bare chest.

“Preach it, Garland,” Jasper said. “Turn that wolf into a lamb.”

Garland ignored Jasper. “We ain’t trying to take more than our share, Mr. Justice,” he said with upturned palms. “We’re just looking for a little contribution. A show of good faith.”

“I don’t have the money,” Val said one last time, knowing it was a waste of breath. Nothing he was going to say would make a difference to these two. He turned on his heel and exited the office. But Garland’s voice followed him.

“I ain’t looking for an answer today. Why don’t you take some time and think about it? Think of all the good that money could do! Reflect on that!”

Val kept walking. He passed the cubicles, ignoring the eyes that followed him, and reached the front door only to find it blocked by a pair of beefy convicts standing shoulder to shoulder.

The duo looked like twins from their identical gray buzz-cuts to their overdeveloped shoulders and flabby guts. A pair of overfed junkyard dogs looking for someone to stomp.

“Remember me?” the one on the right asked, thrusting his head forward, working his jaw like he had something stuck in his throat. “About sixteen years ago? Sixteen years and seventy-seven days to be exact.”

It took Val only a second to place the face. Add a patchy beard and a greasy ponytail and you had Ansel Haskell, a scumbag rapist that Val had arrested for complicity in a dope-homicide. Ansel had gotten twenty years. He had deserved lethal injection.

Val had been pushed enough for one day. First Zeke, then Jasper Smith and now Ansel Haskell. A point had to be made. A line drawn in the sand. And, with guys like this, that meant someone had to get hurt.

“Do you remember every cockroach you step on?” Val asked, turning himself slightly to the right, his left shoulder coming up to protect his chin, his hands loose at his sides.

Ansel snarled and threw a looping, brick-sized right fist at Val’s jaw, a punch that was so clearly telegraphed that it seemed to hang in the air for half an hour. Val shuffle-stepped left, easily slipping the punch, ducked inside Ansel’s guard and snapped an elbow into the ex-con’s nose. Cartilage crunched as Ansel’s nose collapsed in a spray of blood, the blow rocking the big man back on his heels. Ansel’s eyes went screwy and his guard drooped, leaving his sagging gut exposed to the right hook that Val drove wrist deep into the prison flab.

Ansel’s breath exploded from his lungs as he jackknifed around the punch, his head arcing down just as Val’s knee came up, slamming into the man’s already wrecked nose. Ansel went over backward, hitting the concrete with a meaty thud, out cold.

Ansel’s sidekick hadn’t made a move; he was just standing there, jaw hanging, hands limp at his side. Maybe it had all happened too fast for his simian brain to process - the entire fight had taken less than three seconds - or maybe he had decided that it really
wasn’t
his fight after all. Val didn’t give a damn; the guy had bought a ticket, he was damned sure going to
take the ride.

Val took a step forward. Asshole number two took a step back, shook his head and held his hands up, palms out. Val snagged one of those hands and wrenched it up and under, spinning the bigger man around and separating the shoulder from its socket with a wet ‘pop.’ The ex-con screamed and went to his knees. But that scream was nothing compared to the one that blasted from his throat when Val chopped down on his forearm, fracturing his ulna in a twisting spiral, an injury that was ten times more painful than a clean break. Val kicked him between the shoulder blades and he flopped face-first to the concrete beside Ansel. He stayed down, sobbing and clutching his broken arm.

Val turned to face the room. He raked his eyes over the men still seated in their cubicles.

“Anyone else got a grievance?” he asked, staring them down one man at a time. Nobody said anything, nobody even blinked, but a slow, sarcastic clapping came from the doorway to Garland’s office where Jasper Smith was leaning in the doorframe, looking mildly amused.

“How about you?” Val asked. “Plenty of room left on the floor, Jasper.”

Jasper pursed his lips and shook his head, but he didn’t look scared. “I believe I’ll take me a rain check on that.”

Val didn’t reply. He could barely restrain himself from crossing the room to kick Smith’s ribs in. But he knew a simple beating wouldn’t be enough for Jasper; he would have to kill the man. And that would put everything that Val loved in jeopardy; his wife, his children, even his freedom. He turned and stepped over Ansel and through the door.

“Bye now, Vicious,” Jasper Smith called after him, “I’ll be seeing you.”

11

Victoria
raced down the left hand lane of IH 30 toward Oak Cliff, weaving onto the shoulder when necessary, flying by big rigs and minivans, blasting her horn and pushing the tachometer to its redline limit. She wanted to be on the scene before SWAT made their move. If there was a chance of taking Axel alive she wanted to be there to ensure that he was.

In Texas the police didn’t often seek extrajudicial revenge for fallen officers - cop killers were automatically on the fast track for lethal injection - but ‘accidents’ had been known to happen and she wanted to talk to Axel.

She jumped off the freeway at Marsalis Avenue, opposite the Dallas Zoo where a sculpture of a giraffe peeked over the northbound lanes. She flew up the off-ramp, gunned the Jeep through a tire-squealing right turn onto Marsalis, then took an even harder left onto 12
th
Street only to find the street blocked by a trio of DPD blue-and-whites.

She stood on the brake, driving it into the floorboard, and skidded to a stop just inches from the nearest patrol car, the Jeep’s rear end still blocking the inside lane of Marsalis, her heart lodged in her windpipe.

A pair of uniformed cops were up and running toward her before the Jeep had come a stop, guns drawn, expressions hostile. They were both yelling, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying, though the guns made their point clear enough.

Beyond the two oncoming officers, 12
th
street was swarming with cops, most of them crouched behind a haphazardly parked collection of patrol cars and DPD SUVs, their shotguns, rifles and pistols aimed at a faded prairie style home with a sagging front porch. At the center of the activity, Jack Birch was standing at the rear of the SWAT teams’ Lanco BearCat armored vehicle, surrounded by a half-dozen SWAT officers dressed in dark blue jumpsuits.

Jack yelled something at the officers advancing on Victoria that stopped them in mid-stride, but they didn’t look happy about it. They grudgingly lowered their weapons, turned, trotted back to their patrol car, and dropped to their knees behind the front fender,

Victoria exited the Jeep. Technically, though she was an officer of the court, she wasn’t allowed at the scene of a crime in progress, but her years of working closely with the police, and her reputation for getting max-time, had bought her passage beyond the police tape dozens of times in the past.

But this day was different.

“Stop right there. Counselor.” Birch barked as he broke away from the SWAT officers and quickly walked her way, ducking low to keep the cluster of cop cars between himself and the dilapidated house.

The house was almost paintless, slump-shouldered and weary looking, its windows and doors covered in rusty burglar bars. A slot with a metal hatch had been cut into the center of the front door to allow drug transactions without face to face contact. Your standard issue dope house. But it wasn’t the house that drew her eyes, it was the bullet-riddled DPD squad car parked directly in front of it. The car was smoke blackened and buckled like a Coke can that had been stuffed full of firecrackers.

Birch came to a stop beside her then turned his eyes back on the house. As he spoke the cigarette dangling from his lips bobbed up and down, sending up twisting curls of smoke that obscured the left side of his face.

“Stay back here, out of the line of fire,” he warned. “They’re still shooting from the upper windows. Blasted the hell out of the first car on the scene.” He jerked his chin at the ruined squad car. “I tried to flag him down, but he flew right past me. He was barely out of the car before the guys upstairs started blazing away. Hit the gas tank. Damn thing blew sky-high.”

“What about the officer?” Victoria asked, dreading the answer.

“He’s fine. Couple of nicks from broken glass, some nasty burns.”

Victoria nodded in relief then got down to business.

“So, what’s the plan?”

“They’re doing too much shooting to wait them out.” Birch replied. “Especially with the zoo right across the highway. SWAT Team Two’s going to take the back door and we got snipers in the old storefront,” he tilted his head at the opposite side of the street, indicating a three-story brick building that had been boarded over and abandoned to the junkies long ago. “Team One and I are going to run the Armadillo right up to the porch,” he added, nodding at the BearCat armored vehicle, “blow the front door and gas ‘em. We’ll make entry and head upstairs. Team Two will blow the back door and come in behind us to secure the first floor.”

Victoria put her hand on Jack’s forearm. “We need Axel alive, Jack,” she reminded him.

Birch nodded. Smoke trickled from his nostrils. “Gonna do my best,” he said.

Considering the situation, it was all she could hope to hear.

“Birch!” the SWAT Teams’ Lieutenant, Felix Aransas, shouted then pumped his fist twice in the air. Time to go.

“Move back a few blocks, counselor,” Jack said then trotted away without another word.

“Be careful, Jack!” Victoria shouted at his back. But she didn’t turn to leave, she moved forward, dropping to the asphalt beside the two officers who had tried to chase her off. They glanced up when she hunkered down beside them, putting their patrol car between herself and the house, but neither said anything. It wouldn’t have mattered if they had. She wasn’t going anywhere until they had Axel Rankin in custody.

Victoria watched as SWAT Team One and Detective Birch coolly went through a last minute weapons check. She was anything but cool. Her heart rate was ratcheted up to ninety beats a minute and her fingernails were carving up her palms. She knew people were going to die today, that was the ugly reality of police work; she just prayed that none of them would be cops.

Compared to the SWAT team, dressed in full body armor and equipped with automatic weapons, Birch looked almost defenseless with his standard-issue bulletproof vest and 9mm pistol. Victoria was surprised that Felix was even allowing Birch to join the breach team. That went against procedure, but Jack probably hadn’t given the lieutenant much choice. With Bastrop dead, Jack would have charged through the door with or without the SWAT team.

After a round of handshakes with his men, Felix climbed through the armored vehicle’s rear hatch and banged the doors closed. The rest of the team, with Birch in the lead, hunkered down behind the Armadillo, weapons up, flak helmets and face shields on. Seconds later, the vehicle’s engine roared and it lunged forward. It lumbered down the street, gathering speed quickly.

Fully automatic gunfire erupted from the upstairs windows and a blizzard of bullets pinged and zinged off the roof of the Armadillo, ricocheting into the surrounding patrol cars, puncturing sheet metal, shattering windows and sending the cops in the street diving for the pavement. None of the rounds reached the SWAT team concealed behind the bulk of the Armadillo.

Twenty feet from the dope house, the Armadillo jumped the curb and crossed the sidewalk, charging at the dope house’s front steps with the SWAT team right behind it, running to keep up. The armored vehicle smashed through the steps and slammed into the porch. Rotten floorboards buckled and caved, sending broken planks flying in every direction, but it didn’t slow down the Armadillo. Its armored front end rammed straight through the porch and crashed into the house. The entire structure shivered and a ten-foot section of the porch roof collapsed, dropping an avalanche of plywood and 2x4s onto the Armadillo’s steel roof.

And then the SWAT team was moving, Jack Birch in the lead. They raced out from behind the Armadillo, protected from gunfire by the remains of the porch roof, clambered up onto what was left of the porch, and charged the front door. The lead cop slapped a hook and chain onto the door’s burglar bars while the rest of the team crouched low, pressing themselves tight against the exterior wall.

The Armadillo’s engine roared again and the vehicle lurched backward, jerking the bars straight out of their frame and dragging them clattering across the sidewalk and out into the street. Almost before the bars were fully out of the way, two of the team attacked the wooden door with a battering ram, knocking it off its hinges with their second swing. A burst of automatic fire chewed at the doorframe as they dropped back to cover and a third officer moved forward in a crouch. He hooked a pair of gas canisters through the gap, tossing them deep into the house, before the gunfire drove him back.

The teargas canisters went off with a double ‘pop,’ instantly flooding the lower floor with a choking white fog that billowed out onto the porch through the battered down door, almost hiding the SWAT team from Victoria’s view. But the gas didn’t stop the bikers. They opened up full throttle, blazing off a barrage of automatic fire from the home’s upper floor, trashing patrol cars and scaring the hell out of the officers hidden behind them. Light-bars and windows exploded, doors and hoods were shredded. A few officers risked their lives to return fire, peppering the second story windows with shotgun and pistol rounds. That fire distracted the bikers upstairs just long enough for the SWAT team to rush through the front door, weapons up. Birch was the last one inside.

Victoria was thankful that Birch had been smart enough to let the better armed and armored men take the lead, but her thankfulness was cut short by the sounds of more gunfire from inside the house. Long, ragged blasts of automatic fire that was immediately answered by a series of controlled three-round bursts as the SWAT team went to work. Someone screamed, full throated and awful, and the gunfire rose to a thunderous roar, as if every person in the house were firing as fast as their fingers could work the trigger.

Suddenly, the gunfire cut off, like clicking off a TV. Someone moaned, another person sobbed a curse and then the street went as silent as a morgue.

Cautiously, Victoria stood and leaned across the cruiser’s rear deck, trying to get a better view of the house, but she couldn’t see much of anything. Teargas oozed from the broken windows and through the bullet-riddled walls. She was inching up the side of the car for a better angle when the uniformed officer closest to her grabbed her shoulder in a vice-like grip and jerked her back down.

His brown eyes blazed out of a bloodless face. “Keep your ass down or fall back to the other side of Marsalis,” he said, his lips skinned back over clenched teeth. “This isn’t a place for tourists.”

Victoria flushed at the insult, but she bit off any reply. It wasn’t the time or place for a petty squabble; people were dying fifty yards away, but one thing was damned certain, she wasn’t falling back to the other side of the street no matter how dangerous it got. She stayed where she was, crouched behind the patrol car on the hot asphalt, and waited through the interminable silence, staring blankly into the dark slot of a drainage inlet cut into the face of the curb ten feet away. Trash had piled up in front of the inlet almost blocking it completely, but something glittered in the pile; a jagged, circular piece of metal, its edges shiny new, half-hidden under a crumpled Frito’s bag.

Victoria’s lungs skipped a breath. She had a good idea what she was looking at, but she had to be sure. She crawled forward on her knees, mindless of the fact that she was ruining a two hundred dollar skirt, and brushed the Frito’s bag aside. What lay underneath it was a half-moon shaped piece of metal with ragged edges that looked like the bottom of a broken metal cup.

“Oh, shit,” she breathed as she ducked down for a closer look, already knowing what she would find. The inside of the metal cup was threaded, a piece of white plumber’s tape still embedded in the grooves. She recognized it immediately for what it was: the end cap of a pipe bomb.

Victoria had been put through a crash course in homemade bomb making during the Park Cities Bomber case, two years before. The bomber had started out by booby-trapping dumpsters with small charges that did little more than scare the hell out of whoever happened to dump a load of trash atop them. Then a homeless woman had climbed into a one of the bomber’s dumpsters to pick out aluminum cans and ended up missing a foot. The crippling of the woman had enflamed the bomber. His next two bombs were much larger, and placed in public trashcans on the streets of downtown Dallas, rigged to take out the first person who used them. Two months into the spree he was caught wiring a trash barrel on Commerce Street, but by then six more people had been disfigured or maimed.

“Shit!” she barked again, loud enough that the cops behind her looked over. The Confederate Syndicate hadn’t hit the gas tank of the patrol car; they had blown it up with a pipe bomb! And where there was one bomb, there would be more.

And Jack Birch was inside the house with only a crummy vest for protection!

As Victoria snatched up the end cap she heard someone inside the house yell, “Team One going up!” and knew that SWAT Team Two would be busting down the back door any second. There wasn’t time to explain what she had found to the two officers crouched behind her; she had to get the information to the SWAT teams’ commander!

Victoria jumped to her feet, kicked off her heels, hiked up her skirt, and ran straight past the two cops, ignoring their startled yells to “Stop!” She rounded the rear of the car and sprinted for the Armadillo where Felix Aransas was crouched, a walkie-talkie glued to his ear.

That’s when all hell broke loose.

Once again, the Confederate Syndicate bikers on the second floor opened fire on the street below. Bullets chewed at the Armadillo, the police cars and the houses across the street. Victoria saw a female officer go down, clutching her chest, trying to stop the blood spilling across her crisp blue uniform. A portly undercover officer with long hair and a greasy beard was up and running before the woman had even hit the ground. He dragged her toward the cover of a bullet-riddled blue-and-white, glancing up at Victoria as she raced past, his eyes bright and round with fear.